Unit 5 · Illinois: Land and People

Find Illinois on a map of the United States. It is near the center of the country, in the region called the Midwest. It is shaped a little like a long arrowhead pointing south. From the top of the state to the bottom is about 380 miles. That is a long drive, more than six hours on the highway.

Illinois has five neighbor states. Wisconsin is to the north. Iowa and Missouri are to the west. Kentucky is to the south. Indiana is to the east. A line where one state ends and another begins is called a border. Some of these borders are straight lines drawn on paper. Others follow rivers.

In the northeast corner, Illinois touches Lake Michigan. Across the lake is the state of Michigan. Chicago, the biggest city in Illinois, sits on the lake shore. The capital, where the state government works, is Springfield, near the middle of the state.

The wiggly borders of Illinois are rivers. The Mississippi River runs down the whole west side of the state. It separates Illinois from Iowa and Missouri. It is one of the longest rivers in the world. Farmers have shipped corn down the Mississippi on boats for two hundred years. At the very bottom of the state, at the town of Cairo, the Ohio River joins it.

The Ohio River forms the southern border with Kentucky. The Wabash River forms the lower part of the eastern border with Indiana. Before there were roads or trains, rivers were the highways. A flatboat could float a family and everything they owned downstream.

One big river runs through the middle of the state instead of around it. The Illinois River starts near Chicago and flows southwest across the state to the Mississippi. Long ago, Native people, French traders and settlers all used it as a path. Today barges still carry grain, coal and steel on it.

Stand on the shore in Chicago and look east. You cannot see the other side. Lake Michigan is so big that it looks like an ocean, but the water is fresh, not salty. It is one of the five Great Lakes, which together hold about one fifth of all the fresh surface water on Earth. Illinois touches only Lake Michigan, along a short strip of shore in the northeast corner.

The lake is why Chicago is where it is. Ships carried goods from the East across the lakes. They unloaded them at Chicago. From there, the goods went by canal or train to the rest of the country. The lake is also where Chicago gets its drinking water. Big water plants clean it and pipe it to millions of homes.

The lake changes the weather too. In summer, a breeze off the cold water cools the lakefront. In winter, air blowing across the lake picks up moisture and drops heavy lake-effect snow on towns downwind. Illinois built parks and beaches along much of the shore so everyone can reach the water.

Why is Illinois so flat? The answer is ice. Long ago, during the Ice Age, the Earth was colder than it is now. Snow piled up in Canada year after year and never melted. It squeezed into ice sheets more than a mile thick. Those ice sheets, called glaciers, slowly crept south like frozen bulldozers.

The glaciers pushed into Illinois more than once. The last big ice sheet melted away from northern Illinois roughly fifteen thousand years ago. As the ice moved, it scraped off hills. It filled in valleys. It ground rocks into fine dust. When it melted, it left that ground-up rock spread across the land. How do we know? The rocks and gravel under Illinois soil match rocks from Canada.

Not every part of the state was covered. The ice never reached the far south. So the Shawnee Hills there are still rough and rocky. A small corner in the northwest was also missed. It has steep hills too. Everywhere else, the glaciers left flat land. They also left a deep layer of crushed rock. That layer would become some of the best soil in the world.

After the ice melted, grass grew on the crushed rock. Not short lawn grass. Tallgrass prairie: big bluestem, Indian grass and switchgrass, along with hundreds of kinds of wildflowers. The roots went deep, sometimes ten feet or more. Every year the grass died back and rotted. Every year the roots grew again. Fires set by lightning, and by Native people, burned off the dead stalks and kept trees from taking over.

This went on for thousands of years. All that rotting grass and root built up a thick layer of dark, crumbly earth called topsoil. In some places the black topsoil in Illinois is more than three feet deep. Rich soil is why the state’s nickname is the Prairie State. It is also why Illinois grows so much food.

Settlers arrived in the early 1800s. Prairie then covered about two thirds of Illinois. Their iron plows stuck in the tough roots. Then, in 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere made a smooth steel plow. He worked in Grand Detour, Illinois. His plow cut clean through the sod. Within a few decades, nearly all the prairie was plowed into farms. Today less than one percent of the original prairie is left, in small preserves.

Geographers divide Illinois into regions, areas that share a way of life or a kind of land. The northern region is where most people live. About two out of every three Illinoisans live in Chicago and its suburbs, which spread across several counties. Chicago itself has about 2.7 million people, more than any other city in the Midwest.

Trains, highways and two big airports meet in Chicago. Factories, banks, hospitals and offices give people jobs. Rockford, in the north, makes machine parts and tools. Farther west, the Rock River winds through hilly country. The northwest corner, near Galena, has the highest ground in the state.

Northern Illinois is not all city. Just outside the suburbs, the land turns quickly to corn and soybean fields. Many towns are a mix: a train station to the city on one side, a grain elevator on the other.

Drive south from Chicago and the land opens up. Central Illinois is the flattest, richest farmland in the state. Fields of corn and soybeans run to the horizon. Farmhouses, grain silos and small towns break them up. Springfield, the capital, sits here. So does Peoria, on the Illinois River. So do Champaign and Urbana, home of the state’s biggest university.

Keep driving south and the land changes. The glaciers never reached the bottom of the state, so the ground begins to roll and then rise. The Shawnee Hills cross southern Illinois from river to river. They are covered by the Shawnee National Forest, with sandstone cliffs, canyons and waterfalls. Some people call this region Little Egypt, and the town at the very tip is named Cairo.

Southern Illinois has a milder, wetter climate. Peach and apple orchards grow well. Coal lies under much of the region. Because the south and the north are so different, people from the two ends of the state sometimes feel like they live in different places. In a way, they do.

Illinois is far from any ocean, so nothing keeps its weather steady. Summers are hot and sticky. Winters are cold, with snow that can shut down roads. Spring and fall bring quick changes. This pattern is called a continental climate. The south is a little warmer and wetter than the north, which is why peaches grow there and not near Chicago.

Spring in Illinois brings tornadoes. Warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico crashes into cold, dry air from the north. The two twist together. A spinning funnel of wind can drop from a storm cloud. The worst tornado in United States history struck in 1925. It tore across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in one afternoon. It killed about seven hundred people. Most of them were in southern Illinois towns like Murphysboro.

Rivers bring floods. In the wet summer of 1993, the Mississippi and Illinois rivers rose over their banks for weeks. Water covered farms and towns. Today, towns build tall earthen walls called levees along rivers. Schools practice tornado drills. Knowing the weather is part of living in Illinois.

A natural resource is something from nature that people use. The most valuable one in Illinois is not gold or oil. It is dirt. The deep black topsoil left by the prairie makes Illinois one of the best places on Earth to grow food. Farmland covers about three fourths of the state.

Under the soil lies coal. Coal is a black rock. It formed from swamp plants that were buried and squeezed for millions of years. It burns hot. People used it to heat homes and to make electricity. Illinois has some of the largest coal deposits in the country. Most of it lies under the central and southern parts of the state. Coal mining gave many towns their jobs. But burning coal dirties the air. So less coal is mined today than in the past.

Water is the third great resource. Lake Michigan gives drinking water to Chicago and its suburbs. Rivers carry barges and water the fields. Under the ground, layers of sand and gravel left by the glaciers hold water. Towns pump it up through wells. Rich soil, coal and water: the glaciers and the prairie gave Illinois all three.

Look out the window on a drive across Illinois in August. Row after row of tall green corn. Then a lower, bushier field of soybeans. Then corn again. These two crops cover most of the farmland in the state. Illinois is usually one of the top two states in the country for both, along with Iowa.

Very little of that corn is the sweet corn you eat off the cob. Most is field corn. It feeds cows, pigs and chickens. It is ground into cornmeal and corn syrup. Some is turned into a fuel called ethanol and mixed into gasoline. Soybeans are crushed for oil and for protein-rich animal feed. Both crops are shipped by train and barge, down the Mississippi to the port at New Orleans, and on to countries around the world.

Farming has changed. In 1900, most families in Illinois lived on farms and worked with horses. Today one farmer with a giant machine can plant or harvest hundreds of acres in a day. Fewer than one in fifty Illinoisans farms now. But the state still grows food for millions of people who have never seen a cornfield.

The land shapes people, but people also shape the land. Much of the Illinois prairie was wet and swampy in spring. Farmers dug ditches and buried clay pipes called drain tiles to carry the water away. Thousands of miles of them still run under the fields. Without them, much of central Illinois could not be farmed.

Chicago made the biggest change of all. The Chicago River used to flow into Lake Michigan. It carried the city’s waste into its own drinking water. People got sick. So engineers dug a deep canal. In 1900 they made the river flow backward, away from the lake and toward the Mississippi. Chicago also filled in part of the lake to build parks. It even raised whole streets out of the mud.

Every change has a cost. Draining the wetlands took away homes for ducks and fish. Plowing the prairie erased it. Coal mines left scars. Today people work to restore some of what was lost, replanting prairie and cleaning rivers. The question for your generation is how to use the land and still take care of it.

Stand at the top of Monks Mound in southern Illinois. It is a hill of earth about one hundred feet tall. Its flat top is bigger than a football field. People built it by hand, basket by basket, more than nine hundred years ago. Around it once stood more than a hundred smaller mounds, a great plaza and thousands of houses. This was Cahokia, the largest city north of Mexico in its time.

Cahokia was busiest around the year 1100. Archaeologists, who study the past by digging up what people left behind, think ten to twenty thousand people lived there. Farmers grew corn, squash and beans on the rich river bottomland. Traders brought seashells from the Gulf of Mexico and copper from Lake Superior. A circle of tall wooden posts marked the sunrise on the first day of each season.

By about 1350, the people of Cahokia had left. No one is sure why. Floods, dry years, wars, or worn-out land may all have played a part. We know about Cahokia only from what is left in the ground: pots, tools, house posts, and the mounds themselves. Today it is a state historic site and a World Heritage Site, and you can climb Monks Mound yourself.

French explorers paddled down the Mississippi in 1673. They met people who lived in large villages along the rivers. These were the Illinois, also called the Illiniwek or Inoka. They were not one tribe but several related nations. The Peoria, the Kaskaskia and the Cahokia were among them. The French wrote their name down as Illinois, and the land took that name.

The Illinois lived in long houses covered with woven mats, in villages that could hold thousands of people. In summer, women grew corn, beans and squash. In winter, families spread out to hunt bison and deer. They traded with other nations along the rivers, and they were known for their long journeys.

The 1700s were hard for the Illinois. Diseases from Europe, which they had never met before, killed many. Wars with other nations killed more. By the early 1800s, most of the Illinois people had been pushed out of the state, and in 1832 the last remaining tribes were forced to move west. Today their descendants belong to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.

The first Europeans in Illinois were not farmers. They were French. In 1673, a priest named Jacques Marquette and a mapmaker named Louis Jolliet paddled down the Mississippi and back up the Illinois River. They were looking for a route to the sea. A few years later, an explorer named La Salle built a fort near today’s Peoria.

What the French wanted most was fur. Beaver fur made the best hats in Europe, and a hat could sell for a lot of money. French traders paddled canoes deep into the country. They traded metal pots, cloth, knives and guns to Native hunters for beaver and deer skins. Many traders married Native women, and their children grew up speaking both languages.

The French built small towns and forts along the Mississippi: Kaskaskia, Cahokia and the stone Fort de Chartres. Priests built churches. Farmers grew wheat. But France lost a war with Britain in 1763 and gave up the land. The British held it briefly. Then, during the American Revolution, a Virginian named George Rogers Clark captured Kaskaskia in 1778, and Illinois became American.

On December 3, 1818, Illinois became the twenty-first state of the United States. It was a small, quiet place. Only about thirty-five thousand people lived in the whole state, most of them in the far south near the rivers. Chicago did not exist yet. The first capital was the old French town of Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi.

Settlers came down the Ohio River on flatboats from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Later they came overland from New York and New England. They built log cabins, cleared land and planted corn. They argued about slavery. Illinois entered as a free state, but for years some people were still held as slaves there, and Black residents had few rights.

As the state filled up, the capital moved north, first to Vandalia in 1820 and then to Springfield in 1839. A young lawmaker named Abraham Lincoln helped push for the move to Springfield. By 1850 Illinois had more than eight hundred thousand people. The empty prairie was filling fast.

Before trains, the cheapest way to move heavy things was by water. But the Great Lakes did not connect to the East Coast or to the Mississippi. So people dug canals, long ditches of water that boats could travel. In 1825, New York finished the Erie Canal. It linked Lake Erie to the Hudson River and New York City. Now a boat could go from Chicago all the way to the ocean.

Illinois built its own canal. Workers dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal from Chicago to the Illinois River, about ninety-six miles. Thousands of the diggers were Irish immigrants who worked with shovels and wheelbarrows. The canal opened in 1848. Now grain from Illinois farms could float to Chicago, across the lakes, through the Erie Canal, and on to New York.

The canals changed everything. Farmers could sell corn and wheat far away. Lumber from Michigan forests came to Chicago to build houses. Chicago, which had only a few hundred people in 1830, grew into a busy town of warehouses, docks and grain elevators. The canal made Chicago the place where the East met the West.

Canals froze in winter and moved slowly. Trains did not. In the 1850s, railroads raced across Illinois. The Illinois Central, finished in 1856, ran the whole length of the state, about seven hundred miles. For a while it was the longest railroad in the world. Along its tracks, the railroad company sold land to settlers and planted new towns every few miles.

Rails were laid on top of the flat prairie, so building was fast and cheap. Trains carried corn, hogs and cattle to Chicago and carried plows, cloth and lumber back out. A trip that took a week by wagon took a day by train. Towns that got a station grew. Towns that did not often died.

Chicago became the center of the web. By 1860 more than ten rail lines met there. The city built enormous stockyards where cattle and hogs from across the West were sold and turned into meat, then shipped east in ice-cooled railroad cars. By 1890 Chicago had more than a million people. Only New York was bigger.

The place where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan was once a muddy marsh. Its name comes from a Native word for the wild onion or garlic that grew there. The first non-Native settler was a trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He was a Black man of African and French background. He built a farm and trading post there in the 1780s.

In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn at the river mouth to guard the spot. Chicago became a town in 1833. It had about three hundred and fifty people. The Potawatomi, who lived in the area, signed a treaty that same year. They were forced to give up their land and move west. The town they left behind grew wildly.

The canal, and then the railroads, did the rest. By 1860 Chicago had more than one hundred thousand people. Immigrants arrived from Germany, Ireland, Sweden and Poland to build, dig and work in factories. By 1870 the population was about three hundred thousand. Then came the fire.

On October 8, 1871, after a long dry summer, a fire started in a barn on the West Side of Chicago. A strong wind pushed it northeast into the heart of the city. Wooden buildings, wooden sidewalks and wooden streets fed it. It jumped the river. It burned for two days. About three hundred people died. About one hundred thousand lost their homes. Roughly seventeen thousand buildings were gone.

Then the city started over. Help came by train from across the country: food, blankets, money and lumber. New laws said downtown buildings had to be made of brick, stone or iron instead of wood. Builders tried new ideas. In 1885, the Home Insurance Building went up with a frame of steel holding up its walls. Many people call it the first skyscraper.

Twenty-two years after the fire, in 1893, Chicago hosted a world’s fair to show off. Millions of visitors came to see white palaces, electric lights and the first Ferris wheel. Chicago had gone from ashes to one of the great cities of the world. The fire had cleared the way.

In 1916, a young man in Mississippi read a copy of the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper that friends passed hand to hand. It said Chicago had jobs in steel mills and stockyards that paid real wages. It said Black people could vote there and send their children to school. He bought a train ticket north. Millions made the same choice. Historians call it the Great Migration.

Why leave? In the South, laws kept Black people from voting, from good schools and from most good jobs. Violence was common and the law did not protect them. In the North, factories needed workers during World War One. Chicago’s Black population grew from about forty-four thousand in 1910 to more than two hundred thousand by 1930.

Chicago was not a promised land. Many landlords would rent to Black families only in one part of the South Side, so housing was crowded and cost too much. In 1919, a fight at a beach turned into a week of riots that killed dozens of people, most of them Black. Still, migrants built churches, businesses, newspapers and music. The blues came up the river from Mississippi and became Chicago blues. The neighborhood called Bronzeville became a center of Black life in America.

Illinois today has about twelve million eight hundred thousand people. It is one of the six biggest states. Chicago is still the center, with about two point seven million people. Its airport is one of the busiest in the world. Its tall towers, trains, museums and lake parks draw visitors from everywhere. About one in every five Illinoisans was born in another country. In Chicago you can hear more than a hundred languages.

Outside the city, Illinois still feeds the world. Its farms grow more corn and soybeans than almost any other state. Trucks, trains and barges carry grain from small towns to ports and factories. The state also makes machines, medicines and food products, and Chicago is a center for banks and trading.

Illinois is also a place of learning. The University of Illinois in Urbana and Champaign, founded in 1867, is one of the largest universities in the country. Scientists there helped invent early computers and the web browser. The University of Chicago, Northwestern and many others bring students from around the world. Springfield remains the capital, where the state’s laws are made.

Abraham Lincoln moved to Illinois at twenty-one, in 1830. He split rails, ran a store, and taught himself law from borrowed books. He became a lawyer in Springfield and a lawmaker. In 1858 he warned that the country could not stay half slave and half free. In 1860 he was elected president. He led the nation through the Civil War, and in 1863 he declared enslaved people in the rebel states free. He was shot in 1865, and a train carried him home to Springfield.

Jane Addams grew up in Cedarville, in northern Illinois. In 1889 she moved into a rundown mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago, in a neighborhood full of poor immigrants, and opened Hull House. It offered a kindergarten, English classes, a gym, art and a place to be heard. Addams fought for safer factories, laws against child labor and cleaner streets. In 1931 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Mississippi in 1862. She became a teacher and then a journalist. When a mob murdered her friends in Memphis, she wrote the truth about lynching and printed it, though her office was destroyed and her life threatened. She moved to Chicago in the 1890s, helped found groups for civil rights and women’s votes, and never stopped writing. Chicago named a major street for her in 2019.

Ronald Reagan was born in 1911 in the small town of Tampico, Illinois, and grew up in Dixon, on the Rock River. As a teenager he worked as a lifeguard. He went to Eureka College in central Illinois, then became a radio sports announcer and a movie actor in California. He was elected governor of California, and in 1980 he was elected president. He served two terms, from 1981 to 1989.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. After college he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer on the South Side. He helped neighbors push for better housing and jobs. He taught law at the University of Chicago. He served in the Illinois state senate in Springfield. In 2004 Illinois voters sent him to the United States Senate. In 2008 he was elected president, the first Black president. He gave his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. He served from 2009 to 2017.

The two men belonged to different political parties. They disagreed about how big government should be and what it should do. Reagan argued for lower taxes and fewer government rules. Obama argued for government help with health care and jobs. Americans still argue about both. But both men learned about people and politics in Illinois towns and neighborhoods first.